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For several decades now, the US government has been fighting a “war on drugs.” Drug abuse results in 40,000 deaths each year in this country, a number that has not changed noticeably despite the billions that have been spent in this “war.” But there is another type of drug use that is killing Americans in much larger numbers – and about this, the government has raised nary a peep. In fact, each of the drugs in this category has been manufactured and sold with the express approval of the US Food and Drug Administration. So while one branch of the government is fighting tooth and nail to try and halt the use of drugs that kill 40,000 annually, another arm of the very same government is aiding and abetting an industry whose products are killing over 100,000 people each year.
Americans spent approximately $300 billion last year on pharmaceutical drugs prescribed by physicians. Clearly, most people believe that pharmaceuticals are necessary for the preservation of their health and welfare. And just as clearly, the doctors who prescribe these medicines believe the same thing. But in fact it is these drugs, which are supposed to save people’s lives or at least make those lives much more pleasant, that are responsible for the premature deaths of over 100,000 American men, women, and children each and every year.
Of course, drug abuse statistics can be quite shocking, but since we all know that prescription drugs are misused and abused by a lot of people, perhaps we are not completely surprised to learn of their overall death toll. But we are not talking about drug abuse here, as the term is normally understood. The 40,000 casualties from illegal drug use mentioned initially already include deaths from unauthorized use and abuse of prescription drug use, which is, after all, against the law.
No, the 100,000 who die each year from taking pharmaceuticals are people who took what was prescribed in exactly the dosages recommended. But instead of recovering from their medical conditions, they left those conditions behind by moving on to the afterlife. As unbelievable as it may seem, the 100,000 who die from prescription drug use each year are killed by the recognized side effects of those drugs – side effects that did not prevent those drugs from getting FDA approval. Rather than being harmless, beneficial lifesavers that protect the American people from the ravages of illness and disease, pharmaceuticals are powerful, dangerous, toxic substances that kill more people than all illegal drugs combined.
Inventing and Selling Illness
It would be one thing if all of these drugs were being prescribed for terminal conditions. In that case, it could at least be argued that the people taking them would have died anyway, so trying pharmaceutical remedies might be worth the risk. But the reality is that most prescription drugs are sold to treat conditions, disorders, or syndromes that are not a threat to anyone’s survival. And even this might be conceding too much – in many cases, pharmaceuticals are being prescribed for medical conditions that appear to be completely imaginary.
In the United States, drug companies are allowed to aggressively market prescription drugs, an activity that is banned in every other western country except New Zealand. What these companies have discovered is that the best way to make a big profit is to create the drugs first, and then invent a disease like restless leg syndrome or overactive bladder that those drugs can be prescribed to treat. Pharmaceutical companies have made huge profits from the creation of campaigns designed to convince people that everything they experience that is the least bit unpleasant is a “syndrome” or “disorder” that can only be cured by taking expensive prescription drugs.
Who is Watching the Watchdogs?
You might expect the FDA to be quite reluctant to approve new drugs targeted at dubious new “diseases.” However, the FDA is actually in bed with the pharmaceutical industry and rarely rejects anything for initial approval. When drugs start killing people later, they are sometimes withdrawn from the market, but not until they have already done a lot of damage. Cementing the relationship between the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies is that the latter are now required to pay for the former’s reviews of their new drugs, which means that the drug companies are funding their own rubber-stamp approvals.
Maybe the FDA can’t be relied upon, but you would certainly expect doctors to blow the whistle on drug company nonsense. However, Big Pharma has found effective ways to co-opt the medical profession, hiring doctors as paid advisers or scientific consultants, funding their educations, or giving them abundant free samples to hand out to their patients. There is an interlocking relationship between pharmaceutical companies, government regulators, medical schools, and individual doctors, as the drug companies have used their incredible profits to buy themselves a lot of friends. And because the medical establishment is treated with such deference by the subservient media (who make a lot of money from carrying drug company advertising), what passes for “medical reporting” on most television news programs or newspapers amounts to little more than breathless promotion of the latest miracle product or cure that is promised in a press release put out by a drug company or the researchers they are funding.
Killing the Patient to Save Him
It is now almost impossible to watch a television program without being inundated by ads for pharmaceuticals that claim they can successfully treat dozens of different diseases or syndromes. By far the most interesting and informative part of these ads is when the narrator of the commercial is forced by law to list all of the side effects of that particular drug. It is striking that in almost every instance, the side effects sound worse than the disorder that will supposedly be helped by this latest wonder drug.
Common sense would seem to indicate that when this is the case, a drug shouldn’t be approved for use. Unfortunately, the drug companies are so profitable and have so much political power that nothing can stop them from selling their deadly poisons to the gullible American population – more than 50% of whom are now taking at least one prescription drug.
Before taking any pharmaceutical, anyone dealing with a health issue of any type should investigate every available natural treatment first. There are thousands of natural substances out there that have been used for centuries to treat every health condition under the sun. These traditional remedies are gifts from God— and more than likely, none of them cause side effects such as projectile vomiting, seizure, internal bleeding, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, migraine headaches, blindness, stroke, organ failure, or death.
